A9X anniversary
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of the A9X’s dominant 1979 season, with the cars and even some of the stars at the Phillip Island Classic.
It’s hard to imagine a historic race meeting with more cars and more anniversaries to celebrate. In addition to hosting some 500 historic racing machines, this year’s Phillip Island Classic Festival of Motorsport celebrated the 50th anniversary of Formula Ford and the Bolwell Nagari, and the 30th running of the Phillip Island Classic event itself.
But it’s the 50th anniversary of the Holden Dealer Team, the 40th anniversary of Peter Brock’s (and Jim Richards’) six-lap steamroller Bathurst victory in the HDT Torana A9X, and,
phew, Bob Morris’s touring car championship title the same year in the same Torana model that we wish to concentrate on here.
By happy co-incidence, among the racing entries was one of the Ron Hodgson Racing Torana A9Xs Bob Morris used during his ’79 championship-winning campaign. This is the car now in the hands of Andrew Cannon, who gave the ’79 ATCC winner its historic racing debut in the Heritage Touring Car races. What a great way to celebrate the milestone!
Cannon owns both Hodgson A9X Hatchbacks Morris used to win the title, and had both of them with him at Phillip Island. The car he recently purchased, in 2017, was there for display purposes (it’s a time capsule), while Cannon had his first race run in the sister car, the one restored by the Hinton family in the early 2000s. Look for a major feature on the Cannon cars in a coming issue.
Fittingly, Bob Morris was there to see both his old Ron Hodgson Racing A9X Hatchbacks reunited once more with the race track. Morris was to have been reunited with them himself in
an on-track demo, but amid the jam-packed race schedule it couldn’t be organised before Bob had to leave for his ight back to Sydney.
Bob Morris was far from the only ’70s/’80s touring car star on the Island – and a fair portion of them were also former A9X drivers: HDT factory drivers John Harvey, Ron Harrop and Richards, Alfredo Costanzo (the open-wheeler star who nished fourth in his ’79 Great Race debut alongside Allan Grice in the Craven Mild A9X), Kevin Bartlett and more.
Ford fans may not wish to hear it, but we note that the ex-A9X race aces in attendance also included Allan Moffat (that one time he drove a Ron Hodgson A9X at Amaroo Park in ’79), and Fred Gibson (the King George Tavern Hatchback he shared at different times with Christine Gibson and Joe Moore). One of the hot-selling items of merchandise over the weekend was a T-shirt featuring Moffat’s A9X outing.
On the Ford side of things, Dick Johnson, Murray Carter, John French were there, along with John Bowe, who over the weekend was also racing a 5.4-litre V8 Allard roadster – the very car in which Carrol Shelby scored his rst race win.
Also there were former HDT mechanics Bruce Nowacki and Frank Lowndes, Holden’s long-time ‘unofficial’ competition chief from that period, Joe
Felice, and former HDT boss John Sheppard.
Current Erebus Motorsport Commodore ZB Supercar driver David Reynolds turned up and enjoying chatting with some of the past stars and mechanics. When Reynolds mentioned that with a staff of 22,
Erebus was one of the smaller teams in Supercars racing, Bruce Nowacki wryly pointed out that the Holden Dealer Team only had two or three employees when he worked for Harry Firth in the 1970s…
Another A9X four-door making its HTC debut was Robert Ingram’s yellow ITP-sponsored machine, campaigned by Phil Lyon in period.
In addition to the historic Group C race machines there was a nice array of A9X and L34 Torana road cars on the Island. Most of these took part in events arranged by Torana fan and Victorian Historic Racing Register official Tim Hat eld (Tim’s father is Rod Hat eld, owner of the Dustings Holden/Rod and Russ McRae L34 Group C Torana).
In addition to a multitude of roles with the VHRR over the weekend, Tim arranged a street parade through nearby Cowes for the Toranas, including even some of the racecars, on the Friday night. It made for quite a sight, with road and race Toranas parked neatly on one side of the main street of Cowes, with a collection of Bolwell sports cars on the opposite side.
Tim Hat eld also runs a group he calls Torana Magic. Through Tim’s connections to the VHRR, Torana Magic offers Torana owners who attend Victorian historic race meetings the chance to park and display their vehicle trackside, do morning track laps and be part of a photoshoot for something to bring home. Another thing Tim and the VHRR’s Steve Tate have been running are paid hot laps on the track. It’s for a good cause, too, with the money raised going to the childrens’ cancer charity You Are My Sunshine. Some $6000 was raised over the weekend’s on-track activities – which also included paid three-quarter hot laps as a passenger in Mick Cameron’s Peter Brock 1974 HDT Torana L34.